Accreditation Policy

The Portal to the Universe provides a special area for public information officers / press officers (PIOs) with access to submitting press releases and embargoed press releases in English (via an RSS feed).

The Portal to the Universe accreditation policy is designed to be as broad as possible. Our goal is to be able to promote broad dissemination of information from all sources. At the same time, we do need to protect ourselves from misinformation and from press releases that cannot hold up under peer review. To balance these goals, we require all press releases to come from the registered public information officers / press officers or other official representatives of organizations.

In order to become accredited as a PIO at Portal to the Universe, you must provide basic contact information, including your real name and basic geographic information. You must also provide the website URL for the organization you represent. It should be possible to identify PIOs as official spokespeople for the organization via this URL. We recognize that in some cases legitimate press releases may come from nontraditional organizations, such as astronomy clubs and educational facilities, and that such organizations may not have a PIO. In these cases, any administrator or officer of the organization may register.

Accreditation may be revoked without warning if it is found that individual scientists are posting without their organization's approval. We also reserve the right to revoke accreditation if the information conveyed in press releases continues to be scientifically inaccurate after multiple warnings. In general, press releases need to be accurate, internationally relevant, and convey new information not already in the literature.